I don't know whether you've noticed it or not, but everybody who was
pretending to be in charge of America the day before September 11,
2001, is still pretending to be in charge. The difference is that they
have more money to play with, and a hell of a lot more power over our
lives.

If this were a decent civilization, of course, the President, the Vice
President, the entire Cabinet, and every military officer above the
rank of lieutenant colonel (or its bureaucratic equivalent) would have
cut their bellies, hanged themselves, or taken a single cartridge and
their Webley revolvers into an adjacent room and done the decent
thing. We Americans would have had an entirely new government to kick
around.

This is not a decent society, however. Bill Clinton showed us just how
far gone it is. The multitrillion dollar enterprise that has, over the
last century and a half, systematically deprived Americans of their
lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor -- in the name of
protecting their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor -- and
has now been exposed, beyond the ability of anyone to doubt it, as an
utterly empty farce, is being rewarded exactly as if it had prevented
September 11.

What's more, the 280 million survivors of September 11, the men,
women, and children of the United States -- insanely rendered helpless
by their government on the fraudulent excuse that it's protecting them
-- those who, but for the merest fortune, could have been the targets
of the airline terrorists from whom their government failed to protect
3000 innocent individuals, are now being punished by their government,
through explosive spending being done by a political party that always
(falsely) claims to be against high taxes, and by further restrictions
on their already severely damaged rights, as if they were terrorists,
themselves.

This is not entirely a Republican thing. And it would be a tragic
mistake (a mistake Americans are almost certain to make as they begin
to chafe at what's done to them by the despicable Bush administration)
to rush into the waiting arms of the Democrats. Most of the fatal
errors that made September 11 not only possible but inevitable -- the
brain-dead foreign policy, the illegal restrictions on an individual's
means of self-defense -- were committed in the first place by the
Democrats.

Further, the Democrats and their GOP partners in crime -- together
they constitute the monolithic "Boot On Your Neck" party -- depend on
this political ping-pong game they con voters into playing, year after
election year, in order to steal more and more from us. Both parties
-- and any government they run -- are evil and unspeakably corrupt. If
the Clinton and Bush administrations have shown us nothing else, it is
that liberty and the rule of law have no friends among Democrats or
Republicans.

So why do we keep electing this scum, these enemies of everything
that's right or decent? Every couple of years, we punch a hole, fill
in a blank, or flip a lever beside their names. We choose judges,
congressmen, senators, legislators, governors, presidents, and then
spend the next couple of years hoping, praying -- even begging -- that
they won't impoverish us or damage our rights further. The parties do
the nominating, so there's never anything like a free election, and we
respond exactly like halfwitted cattle who think they get to choose
which farmer milks and butcher them, and that this somehow makes it
acceptable.

We have been sheeple, yearning for the warmth and illusory safety of
the barn, even at the ultimate price we know will be exacted in the
slaughterhouse.

At this point in the affairs of humanity, a great many educated and
intelligent individuals are in a state of abject despair for our
republic under limited government, conceived by the Founding Fathers.
America is an empire now, they say, an evil one like all empires, and
past historical experience clearly demonstrates that there's no going
back.

That's what some individuals believe. In my darkest moments, I confess
that I sometimes believe it, too. But history, although it can repeat
itself in some details, is neither mystically nor mechanically cyclic.
Things can stop happening forever (we don't use too many stone axes
any more), and other things can happen (the landings on the Moon, for
example) that never happened before. It took a long time, it cost a
great deal, it was often very hard, and many people still hate us for
it, but some of us stopped a war we saw no reason for, back in the
1960s.

We can stop this war, too, Bush's Bipartisan War on Americans and
their Bill of Rights. We can stop him and his billionaire cronies from
using the unprecedented criminal act of September 11 as an excuse to
enrich themselves further. We used to say, "What if they gave a war
and nobody came?" Today, I ask you, what if they gave an election, and
everybody came -- but nobody voted for anybody who was already
in office?

That's right. Those in office now, in Washington, across the land, are
responsible for denying us the means of self-defense. They're why a
handful of bullies with box-knives could control a plane full of
passengers.

Likewise, they share culpability for an insanely vicious foreign
policy that makes everyone in the world want to kill us. Not because
we're rich -- the economic truth is that Americans toil in a stagnant
market, being sucked dry by political vampires. Not because we're free
-- the average Rumanian has more rights at this moment in history than
the average American. But because this government, controlled by the
Boot On Your Neck Party, kills people and breaks things anywhere and
anytime it feels like it -- and the rest of the world is getting fed
up.

This government, the BOYN party, and the whorish mass media that
service them have blathered so loudly and so long about democracy that
individuals in other countries believe that all Americans
somehow shared in the decision-making, and therefore the blame, for
bombed-out aspirin factories, starving children in Iraq, and Bush's
infantile outrages in Afghanistan. That's why they feel morally
justified in acting against a civilian population the way they did in
New York on September 11.

Well there's a way out, and also a way to get the FBI out of our
libraries and the NSA out of our e-mail. All we have to do is
stop electing this scum, these enemies of everything that's right
or decent. If you've stopped voting already, I can hardly blame you,
but you've given up a tool, a weapon, which just might liberate you,
after all.

I haven't stopped voting, myself, although I've thought long and hard
about it. But this November, when I go to the polls, I'll vote for
nobody who's already in office. Georg Busch's fascist excesses have
shown me the way. Things are just the same in 2002 as if we'd elected
Algore in 2000. It may even be that they're worse. To anyone concerned
with the Bill of Rights, there's no reason that makes sense to choose
between Wayne Allard (BOYN, CO) and Charles Schumer (BOYN, NY).

I don't care anymore if the scum that I do vote for happen to
be Democrats, Republicans, Greens, Prohibitionists, or Flat Earthers,
as long as they're new scum. It would be nice if they were
Libertarians -- if they really knew what that means, and they really
meant it, but it isn't absolutely necessary. If we turn each and every
one of the bastards out, every time they come up for election -- and
they know that's what will happen, every time -- they might eventually
take a hint.

Because I want to make an exception.

I want to see Congressman Ron Paul return to office, because he
believes in limited government and has struggled for that ideal as
long as I've been aware of him. He believes in enforcing the Bill of
Rights, and if Congress were filled with individuals like him, we'd
have a free country. It's true, I have a major political disagreement
with him, because he thinks the Bill of Rights applies to a particular
class of entities -- fetuses -- that I don't. But it's a disagreement
that we'll have to settle later, after the present horror is dealt
with.

Meanwhile, we feel, see, and hear the world in which we live, in terms
of contrasts. We feel the raised dot of Braille against the flat
surface it rises from. We see the orange marmalade cat against the
green bedspread. We hear the high, clear clarinet against the strings
and brasses. The greater the contrast, the more effectively it seizes
our attention. Ron Paul's return to Congress, by an electorate who are
grimly determined to reelect nobody else, would provide political
contrast and teach the most valuable lesson ever taught in American
history.

So it's time to organize. It's time to start collecting pledges from
political addicts swearing off the BOYN party system forever: "I
solemnly swear that I will never again vote for anyone who's already
in office -- in fact I may not even vote for anyone who ever
held office!"

How do they get out of it? How do they redeem themselves? They
probably don't. But their successors will learn, sooner or later, that
all their ambitions, agendas, and schemes come after Bill of
Rights enforcement.

It's time for making buttons and bumper stickers: "VOTE FOR NO
INCUMBENTS".

Be patient, It will take a little time for the idea to spread. But
this is a campaign that can go on, day and night, rain or shine, for
exactly as long as we need it to. Because the Libertarian Party
has no incumbents to speak of, it doesn't conflict with LP
efforts. Best of all, there's no real candidate to betray, embarrass,
or disillusion you.

More than anything, here's the heart and soul, the very core of the
program, and it won't have the desired effect unless we do this part
and do it right: it's time for letters to congressmen and other such
parasites -- maybe the first such letters you've ever written to them;
almost certainly the last -- telling them you're through begging them
to obey the law and respect your rights. They took an oath and then
they broke it, now they have to go. They screwed up, now they're
fired.

You're going to vote for someone else, anyone else. Let them sell used
cars. Let them stand on street corners selling pencils from a tin cup.

For the rest of us, every day will be Independence Day.

Three-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith is the author of 23
books, including The American Zone, Forge of the Elders,
Pallas, The Probability Broach, Hope (with Aaron Zelman), and
his collection of articles and speeches, Lever Action, all of which
may be purchased through his website "The Webley Page" at
http://www.lneilsmith.org. Autographed copies may be had from the
author at lneil@lneilsmith.org.